“The United States patent and legal system has turned into a
battlefield where companies and technology developers can be
attacked. Open source and free software developers have
historically ignored this secondary battlefield, focusing instead
on the primary battlefield of development and proliferation of
their project. This omission leaves open source projects and
individual developers vulnerable to patent infringement lawsuits.
By creating its own defensive patent portfolio as commercial
companies do, the open source community can arm itself for this
battle.“The U.S. patent system is fundamentally outdated. The
twenty-year patent protection rule, while potentially appropriate
in an industry such as biotech, is not appropriate for the software
industry…”